Fish Lips

The plot was hatched at the far dark corner of the bar, between
the popcorn machine and golf video game.

"Pucker up, Doc! Yeah! You can win with those
lips!"

"Looks like the south side of a two-hump camel."

"Sweet 46 and never been kissed."

The conspirators were myself; the Professor;
Sidney Goldolphin, barrister at law; Jimmy Chimichanga; interpretive dancer
Dawn Parfait; and Dr. Barqs. Also Floyd Botts, the only bar bouncer I know of
in a wheelchair. It ain't much of a bar, though Floyd likes to say, "Mess with
me and I'll roll over you like you was roadkill."

Under discussion was the entry of Dr. Barqs
in this kissing contest. Put on by one of those superstores that are open every
minute of every day to sell everything to everybody. The idea is to promote
their new tropical fish department, and the contestants have to kiss a fishbowl
until there's only one set of lips still kissing.

"Yeah, well, there's a $2,000 prize. Even
if it takes 100 hours, that's still 20 bucks an hour!" Doc Barqs glared at the
barrister. "We can't all pass the bar, ya know."

"You've never passed a bar in your life,"
Sidney answered.

"All you gotta do is stand around and do nothin'
for a coupla days," reasoned Jimmy Chimichanga. "You do that every week anyways."

"That's right," agreed Floyd Botts. "I spend
more time on my feet than Doc and I'm in this wheelchair."

"Tut, tut!" the Professor said. "Doc's inertia
will be an advantage here. We set him with his lips on that fishbowl and he
doesn't move! But light labial contact. That's the key."

"But after a certain number of hours, your
brain shorts out," cautioned Sidney. "The brain needs more rest than your feet.
You could really and truly go inside."

"And how would we know?" Dawn Parfait sweetly
asked.

And so a few days later, we all gathered in
the super-aquarium. Doc looked ready; he was rubbing extra-virgin olive oil
on his lips.

Doc Barqs had drawn a fishbowl of neon tetras
for an object of his affections. "I wish he coulda got a bowl of them scum-sucking
catfish they use to clean out the bottom of the tanks," opined Floyd. "Their
lips might inspire you."

There were about a dozen contestants in all,
but the Professor had already handicapped the field and mentally eliminated
those he deemed "the curious and the cowardly." The Prof summarized the remaining
competitors. A bassist for a rock band called Liver Spots who'd painted his
face like Gene Simmons and wanted to know if he could put his tongue against
the fishbowl. A rodeo clown from Winnemucca, Nev. And a woman with tone-on-tone
hair coloring and a Q-tip body.

"She's got lips like Mick Jagger," worried
Jimmy.

Prof waved off any hesitations. "It seems
like our chief opposition is from a clown, a bass player and Olive Oyl's skinnier
sister. Now who will join me in seeking out the friends and agents of these
losers in life and engaging them in a friendly wager?"

The contestants got a 10-minute break every
two hours. We had brought Doc some Stoli in water bottles and some dropping-off-the-bone
shortrib sandwiches. The skinny broad came over to our table. "I'm visualizing
sending a cosmic kiss to my boyfriend, who's at an ashram in Indiana. What's
your motivator?"

The hours dragged on. We began staying in
two-hour shifts. I was there around the 18th hour when some unemployed landscaper
broke his smooch with a bowl of angelfish. They carried him out 10 toes up and
speaking in tongues.

Around the 36th hour, all of us who'd bet
on Doc reassembled because the field was down to him and the four that Prof
had predicted. Midway in the 37th hour, Doc's body began to twitch cap-a-pie
and suddenly he howled as if his cornea had just absorbed a full splatter of
pico de gallo. He grabbed up the bowl of neon tetras and began to chug-a-lug
it. "Cease, you scabrous miscreant!" Prof yelled.

Chaos. Floyd drove into the Gene Simmons bassist,
calling him a "pre-vert" as the wheelchair took his legs out. The skinny broad
collapsed in laughter. The rodeo clown just kept kissing his bowl of guppies.
I'd bet on the wrong clown.

"I couldn't take it any more!" sobbed Doc.
"Their little eyes were looking right into my brain! I had to have them!"

"That's what Sister Mary Fridiswede usta tell
us in school," said Dawn Parfait. "You start out kissing, next thing you know,
you're goin' all the way."

"You just can't beat one of them parochial
educations," Jimmy Chimichanga sadly acknowledged.